As I was preparing for my ‘Finding Your Voice’ course, which starts tonight, I had several friends and students call and express to me what was going on with them. They told me that it was a very intense time for them right now, full of uncertainty, loneliness, and deep anxiety. I spoke about how many people have expressed such feelings to me lately. I passed through a period like that a while ago, and realized that it was something happening in our collective consciousness, not just to me. For me, this is one of the most powerful things about learning to speak from our core, without holding back. And learning to listen from the heart, with unconditional acceptance. We discover that we are not alone! This kind of experience and understanding relieves a lot of our suffering. Things are not easy in our world right now. Our whole species is on the edge of an evolutionary leap, a movement from separation and isolation to unity and mutual engagement. We simply cannot manage by ourselves any more. It is not working. We need each other, in a way we may not have ever needed each other before.
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There is a lot of talk about presence these days. We come upon this word in all sorts of places. Our collective consciousness seems to be moving in the direction of presence, as if in response to some deep and urgent need.
What does it mean to really embody the meaning of this word, and why is it so important to us at this time?
To be fully present is to rest in the state of being. Right now our whole world has been swept up into a frenzy of doing, getting, and achieving. We are all participating in this global trance. Everyone talks about wanting to slow down, but most of us just keep running, hoping that if we run fast enough, sometime soon we’ll find the time to rest.
Today is Thanksgiving Day in Canada. All weekend I have listened to friends and family express their gratitude for life, love, nature, community, spirit, beauty. Many people spoke about how lucky we are to live in North America.
It’s easy to feel how healing and empowering it is to be grateful. And it’s also so easy to forget the gratitude, when we are faced with all the challenges that life brings us.
One of the best practices I have discovered for staying connected to a sense of gratitude is what I call ‘the buddy system.’ Find a friend, and ask them if they would like to exchange a daily gratitude email. (You can include the weekend or not)
Just sit down at your computer and send a few sentences to your friend about something you are grateful for today. It doesn’t have to be big. This is important to remember. One day my friend wrote and said she was grateful for the smell and feel of her clean sheets.
You can commit to doing it for a month, three months, six months, or a year. Some of my students kept going long after they had agreed to stop, because it added a whole dimension to their lives. You’ll probably be surprised at the difference it makes. I was.
Have you heard about the positive deviants? There is growing body of research on this particular group of people. I first heard of them from Bill Harris and Marshall Thurber, a student of Buckminster Fuller. The positive deviants are people from all races and cultures, who have somehow triumphed in situations where everyone else got stuck.
The research has shown that these people have three main characteristics.
First of all, they are very clear about what they want, and do not give up. They just seem to have an inner ability to endure, long after the people around them have thrown in the towel. Jack Canfield, author of the ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul’ books, is a great example. His books have now sold more than any book in history, including the Bible. He went through 142 publishers before he found one who liked the book. The others all told him it would never sell. Sometimes the best things meet huge resistance at the beginning.
I have a friend and yoga student interviewing me about yoga tomorrow. She knows that I have taught yoga for 20 years, and that I lived in India for 25 years. I was telling her this morning that Yoga actually began a long, long time ago in India, with teachings from a scripture called ‘Patanjali Yog Darshan’ The first sutra (verse) says, “Yoga begins now.” This is really the essence of yoga-living in the eternal now. Yoga was never just about building a strong, flexible body. The ancient seers and rishis of India would not have seen the point in that. What good is a great body if you don’t know who you are? What good are beauty, riches, fame, or power, if you think you are just this body-mind that is going to die someday?
The whole purpose of yoga was to cultivate the relationship between the body and mind, and bring the whole being into a state of natural harmony. Then a state of ease and clarity emerges that can support meditation, inquiry and awakening. Awakening to what? To our true nature, our unconditional being.
I noticed this after practicing yoga for many years in India. It was no longer the state of my body that was the focus of my attention, but the clarity, stillness and aliveness that opened up in me during a yoga session.
